# Energy and carbon

The co-op shows members how much energy its inference uses, and what carbon that
represents. This page says where those numbers come from and where they are weak.
The [model list](models.md) covers which providers we use and their energy
sources; this covers how we count.

## What we measure

**Output tokens, per model, per day** — read from our own gateway logs. Nothing
is required of your client, and no per-member figure is published: the dashboards
show co-op totals.

We count **output tokens only**, deliberately. That is the unit
[GreenPT's published metric](https://greenpt.com/blog/introducing-a-new-ai-metric-to-drive-sustainability)
uses ("mWh per 100 tokens"); input tokens are excluded so comparisons hold across
prompts, workloads and models. It also means these figures are **not** total
compute.

## How tokens become energy and carbon

```
energy = output tokens × (Wh per 1,000 output tokens)
carbon = energy × grid intensity of the electricity (gCO2e per kWh)
```

Both factors are held per provider in one table, with the source recorded for
each row, in the portal's
[`metrics_snapshot.py`](https://git.inference.coop/code/member-portal/src/branch/main/metrics_snapshot.py).

### Measured: GreenPT

GreenPT returns an `impact` object with every call — energy in watt-milliseconds,
emissions in µgCO2e — so these are fitted from their own numbers rather than
imported from a third party. Measured 2026-10-28 by regressing energy against
output tokens across prompt sizes (R² ≥ 0.999; there is a real per-request
overhead, because their energy derives from inference *time*):

| Model | Wh per 1,000 output tokens | Implied grid intensity |
|---|---|---|
| `greenpt/deepseek-v4.1-flash` | 0.36 | ~193 gCO2e/kWh |
| `greenpt/glm-5.3-flash` | 1.08 | ~193 gCO2e/kWh |
| `greenpt/green-r` | 0.55 | ~24 gCO2e/kWh |

`green-r` is roughly an order of magnitude cleaner per unit of energy, which is
where GreenPT's claim of up to 40% lower CO2 per query comes from.

### Estimated: everyone else

Providers that do not disclose impact — Tinfoil, Regolo, PublicAI — use a
**documented order-of-magnitude proxy**: 0.5 Wh per 1,000 output tokens at an EU
grid average of 250 gCO2e/kWh. It exists so a day's total is never quietly
missing models. It is an estimate, and it is labelled as one everywhere it
appears. Refining a factor is a data edit, not a code change.

## What this does not cover

- **It is a floor, not a total.** Embedding, audio and image requests carry no
  completion tokens, so their compute is not counted at all. This is the largest
  known gap.
- **Estimates for non-disclosing providers.** The proxy is an order-of-magnitude
  figure, not a measurement of what a given provider actually draws.
- **GreenPT's energy is itself estimated** — from time and documented hardware
  power — so our per-token figures are an efficiency ratio, not a per-call meter
  reading.
- **Training emissions are not included**, for any model we serve. Nobody in this
  market can verify them yet.

## Where to see the numbers

The [member dashboard](https://dashboard.inference.coop) has them under
"Co-op usage" — by day, alongside membership, requests and spend. Operators see
the same series on the admin panel's Trends tab.

## Units, for the curious

`Wh` is a watt-hour (a 100 W bulb for one hour is 100 Wh). `kWh` is 1,000 Wh.
`gCO2e` is grams of carbon-dioxide equivalent. Converting between them is where
mistakes hide: µgCO2e per mWh and gCO2e per kWh are the same ratio, and Wh to kWh
is a factor of 1,000.